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Does anything (apart from electro-magnetic energy itself) travel at speeds
close to c?
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Frank Reed wrote:
At 99% of the speed of light, time aboard ship would slow by a factor of 7.
So for shipboard passengers, the trip would only take 290 thousand years.
Hmmm... Still stinks. Ok, let's crank it up to 99.99% of c. That raises the
time dilation factor to 70.7 so the trip would take merely 29 thousand
years. Every "pair of nines" in that fraction of c adds a factor of ten to
the time dilation so to get the journey down to less than three years of
shipboard time, we would need to travel at 99.99 99 99 99 99% of the speed
of light. You age three years aboard ship, everything else ages two million
years (time dilation factor is 1000000/sqrt(2).